An hour later, arms cramping from their grip on the control toggles, back aching with the dead weight of his rucksack dragging at his harness, he approached the clouds, which were rushing up toward him like a vast, fuzzy cotton floor. The cloud deck flashed past the bottoms of his boots, an indicator of just how quickly he was moving. The clouds were so thick, he almost expected to feel them drag at his legs as he sank into them, but there was nothing except a sudden close blackness that wiped away the stars and coated his visor with droplets of water that turned almost immediately to ice.
Damn! He couldn't see a thing… not even the altimeter on his chest. Releasing his riser, he scraped at his visor with his gloved hand, but there was ice on the glove too, and all he managed to do was smear the mess around. Finally, he reached up and unlocked the visor, sliding it up on his helmet. Blinking against the rush of cold, wet air, he checked his altimeter.
Sixteen hundred eighty-two meters… but that was set to register off sea level. Lake Ohrid was at an altitude of 695 meters, so he should be nine hundred eighty and some meters up — just over three thousand feet. Though his fall had slowed somewhat as he'd descended through increasingly denser air, he was still only about two minutes from touchdown.
Vision returned with startling suddenness as he punched out through the bottom of the clouds. Until that moment, he'd had no way at all of knowing whether he was steering a proper course, short of the rather abstract knowledge that he'd been steering the course given him before he'd left the aircraft, falling at a constant rate, across a known range.
"Damned if geometry doesn't work," he said aloud as the panorama swam into view below him. The scene was cloaked in darkness, of course, but that yawning, black emptiness below was water, and the lights of the castle were dancing off the surface eight kilometers — call it five miles — ahead. North, he could see the town of Ohrid, and beyond that, the lights of what must be the local airport. South were the lights of other towns, their glow outlining the vast, oval blackness of the lake. He'd fallen almost six miles across a distance of fifteen, with a lake seven miles wide and fifteen long as his target. With over one hundred square miles of water to land in, he was coming down almost perfectly on target, almost precisely in the middle of the lake.
Twisting in his harness, he searched for other SEALs but saw no one… not surprising given the night, their garb, and the fact that they were bound to have scattered a bit during the descent. Reaching up to his shoulder, he snapped on his strobe. The IR hood had been removed. While it was possible that someone ashore might see the pulsing flash of the light, the chances were slim across a distance of more than a mile or two, and in any case, an observer might well assume that he was watching a plane. Murdock looked left and right again. There! A flashing red light, and not very far off either, though range was next to impossible to estimate at night. DeWitt was flying parallel to Murdock to the north and just a little below. Gently, Murdock dropped his left toggle slightly, easing his chute into a converging course with the other.
Now, please God, everybody else made it through, and everybody else can see our beacons. Murdock began to concentrate on his landing.
He checked his altimeter again. One hundred ten meters to go. He thought he could see the surface of the water now, sweeping past his feet at an alarming speed. Reaching down, he unsnapped his rucksack and secondary equipment bundles, then let them go. The shock of their release rocked him alarmingly, setting up a nasty oscillation, but he kept control and paid out the rest of the line, allowing his gear to dangle some twelve feet beneath his feet. Next he turned the quick release box to the unlocked position, pulled the safety pin, then opened the safety covers on his Capewell releases.
Closer now… and closer. The water was rushing toward him now, and he could see just how fast he was descending. Ten meters up he pulled down on both steering toggles, curling down the upper rear edge of his canopy like a gigantic set of flaps. The change in aerodynamics brought the front of the chute high, and for a moment, Murdock hung there in the sky, seeking the balance between a gentle landing… and spilling too much air too soon, which would plunge him hard into the lake.
Forward speed arrested, he dropped toward the lake. His equipment bundle struck with a splash, and then the strap holding it gave him a savage tug. The last of his forward velocity was killed by the drag of his rucksack in the water.
The surface rushed up, his feet kicked up spray…
17
At the last possible moment, Murdock squeezed the left-hand Capewell release and yanked down. The chute snapped free on that side, billowing up and spilling its remaining air.
Murdock plunged into the water with a splash, bitterly cold, black water enveloping him as his rate of descent drove him down… down… still further down into the depths. The force of the landing tore the oxygen mask from his face. God, the water was cold. Despite his multiple layers, the water of that mountain lake was frigid. Then his equipment strap yanked at his harness, this time from above and behind, threatening to turn him head-down.
The pack included an inflatable rubber raft, a small one, just big enough to support one man and his equipment, and it had begun to inflate as soon as it hit the water. Still descending, Murdock twisted sideways in the water, and the strap was entangling him. Reaching behind his back, he found the gear release and squeezed it; with the jerk, the ruck broke loose, the strap trailing free in the water. His oxygen mask… where was his mask? Was it still attached? He fumbled with the right-side Capewell, trying to release the chute entirely. What he didn't need at the moment was to become entangled underwater in its shrouds. There! He was clear!
A pull ring at his waist inflated the rubber flotation jacket he wore over his combat harness. He estimated, from the pressure on his sinuses and ears, that he must have descended a good forty or fifty feet down before he finally started to rise again. Holding his breath despite the pounding in his chest, the growing, squeezing sensation in his ribs, Murdock kicked toward the surface, kicking… kicking… and then he broke through into blessed, cold air.
Even without his rucksack, Murdock was still heavily weighted down. His MP5 weighed two and a half kilos with a loaded magazine; he had lots more magazines tucked into pockets in his assault vest, not to mention radio, grenades, and at least five kilos more of sundry equipment. Even with the life jacket, each moment, each second brought him closer to being dragged under and drowned.
One of the first ordeals undergone by recruits at BUD/S training at Coronado involves dropping them into a nine-foot-deep tank of water with their hands and feet tied, requiring them to sink to the bottom, then push themselves off and back to the surface. After that, they learn tricks… like donning a face mask, or swimming the entire fifty-meter length of the pool, hands tied. The process is called "drown-proofing," and it is designed to strip recruits of the panic reflex that is the usual cause of drowning.